We’ve Analyzed 1 Billion Data Points to Find the Friendliest People on Earth

We usually think of social media as the place where one person connects with a group of friends. But what if we leave the one-person view and take an outer space look at the world: what will we discover about nations by the way its people interact with others globally?

We decided to take up this challenge and analyze how social media links people across geographies. In this research we uncover who is the friendliestcountry in the world; the most introvertedcountry; and the most popular country in the world.

How We Measured the World on Twitter

In our research, we analyzed Twitter conversations and following metrics based on accumulative data of 5 years. The data included more than 11 million Twitter accounts.

Our research science team built a cross-country conversation graph based on conversations and following patterns on Twitter. Here is what we found after analyzing more than 1 billion data points:

The Friendliest Country in the World

They say the Canadians are the nicest people on earth, and you know what? It’s all true.

Among the most active countries on Twitter, the Canadians are the friendliest Twitter users in the world. According to our research the Canadians are the most open to conversation with people outside of their country. The average Canadian is having 9.3 conversations with users outside of his/her country.

Not so far behind are the Aussies. The Twitter users from Australia are having 9.1 conversations with outsiders. Still up the chart, but a bit far behind are the Germans with 8.1 conversations. Here are the top 5 friendliest countries on Twitter:

The Most Introverted Country in the World

On the other side of the map are the secluded countries, where people are more likely to have conversations with their own fellow citizens.

Our research discovered that the most “introverted” country is Japan. The Japanese tend to speak almost entirely with other Japanese. Only 7% of the Twitter conversations by Japanese are with people outside of Japan.

The Most Popular Country in the World

This probably won’t shock you, but the most popular country in the world is the US.

We looked into the destinations of the conversations on Twitter. According to our study, the US is the most reached-out-to country in the world. It means that among the outgoing tweets of people around the world, the States is the most popular destination for these tweets. The 2nd most popular country is the UK, and Canada reached the 3rd place.

6 thoughts on “We’ve Analyzed 1 Billion Data Points to Find the Friendliest People on Earth”

This is ridiculous. Twitter is a U.S. company, most Twitter is American. So the fact that many Americans are talking with other Americans, since there are so many of us… makes us unfriendly? Oh, okay. LOL

Hi,
When we started our research we were well aware of this issue. To overcome the obstacle, we measured the interactions per active user. By doing so, we could see how the average American user acts in compare to the average Canadian, Dutch, Japanese, and so on.

It is true that Twitter is an American company, but it is also highly popular in Brazil, Japan, the UK, Indonesia, India, Mexico, and many other countries. The differences between these countries, according to our research, show that the openness to others is more than just the an outcome of the volume of users in your home state. These countries are scattered all around the graph, and hints a behavioral differences between them.

Openness does not mean real friendliness, Noam! Why didn’t you go further to do tweets sentiments’ analysis by country instead?
“Myth is born due to poor research…”
BTW I am wondering why you did not include Israel??